The consent of the punished: Toward a Gramscian theory of penal punishment, labor, and control
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To function and persist in its current form, the carceral status quo depends on not only the consent of the governed, but also the consent of the punished. Yet, while processes of consent are multi-faceted and integral to contemporary penality, they remain under-theorized in punishment scholarship, particularly in US contexts. We present a typology of consent processes both external and internal to the American prison to advance a Gramscian theory of penal punishment. We highlight how the actions and outlooks of the dominant and dominated—among the incarcerated and the free—coalesce to generate carceral hegemony across multiple levels. We apply this framework in an interpretive revisit of previous ethnographic fieldwork conducted in distinct US prison settings. Reinterpreting prior empirical evidence through a Gramscian lens reveals how acquiescence to punitive excess unfolds at macro, meso, and micro levels. Particular attention is paid to ground-level penal labor practices in this process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".